Very Cool!!!

Lack of good storyline.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

. . . says one character in regard to "Ethel Saxton," whose electrocution is the focus of MIDNIGHT. Perhaps not since Thomas Edison's popular flick, ELECTROCUTING AN ELEPHANT (1903; the pachyderm in question was Topsy, America's favorite African animal at the time), has electricity been so entertaining. (Just take a gander at the 10 goggle-eyed all-male witnesses licking their chops in Ol' Sparky's chamber moments before Ethel--who, like Topsy, got a bum rap--blazes away.) Obviously, if revived on a pay-per-view basis, public executions could be a huge new source of government revenue. As one of the French generals says during PATHS OF GLORY (1957), there's nothing like death by firing squad for public morale (even if the human sacrifices are Random Selectees of Society's Best, as is the case in GLORY). Since the Red States have virtually exhausted their supplies of lethal injection drugs, more cinematic electrocutions, hangings, and possibly the guillotine could kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, while setting ratings records. When push comes to shove, the dad in MIDNIGHT has no problem in tossing his own daughter under the wheels of justice, not unlike every Red State taxpayer who sleeps easy at night no matter now many guiltless people (and\or family members) the Innocence Project proves they've gratuitously had a hand in rubbing out. After all, you cannot make an omelet without cracking a few eggs, and every egg has parents.

It was somewhat comical to see the full screen opening credit given Humphrey Bogart in this re-release version from Guaranteed Pictures. One of the mainstays of the public domain bargain bin, "Call It Murder" provides an early look at the future star in a limited role, which in retrospect could have been played by virtually anyone.Bogey's character is a minor hood named Gar Boni, caught in a predicament that requires him to leave town after getting involved with the daughter of a jury foreman. We don't find out much about his circumstances but they must be grim, an accomplice responds to Gar's penchant for baseball by asking - "Hey kid, they got any bulletproof grandstands out there?" Throughout the trial, Stella Weldon (Sidney Fox) finds herself at odds with her father's role; he was able to steer the jury to find Ethel Saxon (Helen Flint) guilty of murder by virtue of pre-meditation. The entire film is used to explore Weldon's (O.P. Heggie) resolve with the verdict in the face of public disapproval and mounting controversy over Saxon's execution. It provides the set up for his own daughter's circumstances when she pulls the trigger on Gar, a case of the jilted lover lashing out. Did she have time to think about what she would do, or was it an instinctive crime of passion?Overall, the film could have used better pacing, there were moments that seemed to drag incessantly. I was intrigued though by an interesting use of camera angles in a scene where Gar's departure from Stella is reflected in a mirror at the bottom of the staircase in the Weldon home. The picture might also have gotten more mileage out of the device of cutting between scenes of Weldon's conscience bound pacing with that of the doomed Saxon in her prison cell. The idea was a good one but was buried too quickly to make the point it could have.In it's way, the movie is a viable pre-cursor to the noir films of the following decade, it's dark and brooding, with the female lead encountering desperation as her payoff, whether or not D.A. Plunkett (Moffat Johnston) succeeds in digging her out of a mess. Her father meanwhile is left to wrestle his own conscience over the quandary of whether justice for one ought to be the basis of justice for all. An interesting moral dilemma as well as a legal one, the story works to confound us all if faced with the same situation.

OK, it's one of Bogart's early ones. But he's hardly in it at all! He's just fine when he's there, but the rest of the movie is slow and boring and poorly shot. Not to mention the acting. Looks like a very low-grade B, which it most probably was. Don't bother.

Humphrey Bogart plays Garboni a gangster involved with the daughter of a jury foreman who helped convict a women of shooting the man who betrayed her. The pressure that falls upon this man and those around him makes the films story. This film is interesting for two reasons it explores guilt from two different perspectives on two different people giving the audience a wide range of emotions and consequences of dealing with the murder. Secondly it features Bogart in a small role, that should have been given more screen time. Bogart was still relatively unknown to the movie going public at the time it was made, of course he has a part that can be categorized as a 'heavy' a role he would fill many times until Maltese Falcon, where he would break through and finally play a lead role that did not require him to be a gangster.